3L Diamond is for application developers who use DSPs, FPGAs and GPPs to create multiprocessor systems. Expressly created for multiprocessor systems, it is a tool-suite and model that provides a highly automated development flow from concept through to applications running in multiprocessor hardware.

Unlike traditional design tools that are resource hungry and designed for single processors only, 3L Diamond simplifies the development of multiprocessor systems to improve productivity, and reduces risk and time-to-market.

Diamond allows you to separate the implementation of your application into two largely-independent sections: a software section based around communicating "tasks" and a hardware section built from processors joined by data-transfer links.

At the heart of Diamond is the configurer, a multiprocessor compiler that combines your software and hardware descriptions into a complete application ready to run. The configurer is the final build step, and so has access to the complete application. This allows it to perform many system-wide optimizations that cannot be attempted by conventional tools.

In the same way that compilers for high-level languages allow you to concentrate on your algorithms without having to worry about low-level details or housekeeping operations, Diamond's configurer frees you to focus on your application by taking care of many important but mechanical details, including loading multiple processors and handling interprocessor communication. It will even deal with memory allocation unless you feel you can do better.

By maintaining a separation between the software and hardware descriptions, Diamond gives you great flexibility without compromising efficiency. Your code need not include details of the actual hardware on which it will run as these will be added by the configurer while it builds your application. This makes it almost trivial for you to change from one hardware configuration to another, for example by using newer, faster processors or changing the number of processors to your target system.

You can read more about the technical advantages of 3L Diamond in this short presentation.